Since 1970 Zeki has been based at University College, being appointed the Professor of Neurobiology in 1981 and most recently, Professor of Neuroesthetics . Here he details his theories on the intimate connections between the brain, the mind and experience

Saturday, April 6, 2013

I describe briefly a new and hitherto
undocumented phobia, which I shall name neurophobia
and those who display it as neurophobes.
It is a somewhat new phobia, perhaps no more than 15 years old but it shares
characteristics with other phobias. It is to be distinguished from the neurophobia that medical students apparently suffer from when studying neurology.

Neurophobia can be defined as a profound dislike, with various degrees of
severity, for cognitive neurobiology and especially for neuroesthetics and for
what these disciplines promise to show us.

Neurophobes are a motley crowd and, as with so many other phobias, they include
people from different backgrounds and walks of life – philosophers of different
degrees of eminence, humanists, religionists and even (surprisingly) some
neurobiologists. This is not to say that all philosophers and humanists are
neurophobes, far from it; many are interested and excited by the discoveries
that neurobiology and neuroesthetics have to offer, but neurophobes are more
vocal. Nor are all religionists neurophobes: I have had some very interesting
discussions with some religionists, who have shown themselves to be hospitable
to new ideas. Interestingly, I have not encountered neurophobia among artists
(yet), which again does not mean that there aren’t neurophobes among them. Hence,
neurophobia, like other phobias, cannot be associated with any particular
grouping, either socio-economic, cultural or otherwise.

Among the characteristics of neurophobia,
one may list the following:

1. An irrational fear: they invest
neuroesthetics in particular with imaginary powers; these include weapons of
mass destruction (WMD), for how else to interpret a statement that neuroesthetics
“… will flatten all the complexity of culture, and the beauty of it as well”?
andother similar statements.

2. A desire to find a place for the mind
outside the brain, not perhaps realizing that cognitive neurobiology and
neuroesthetics study neural mechanisms and hence the brain, and that their
conclusions are to be seen in that context.

3. The use of emotionally charged and
pejorative terms to dismiss neuroesthetics, terms such as “trash”, “buncombe”,
“rubbish” and others like them, which have no place, or should have no place,
in scholarly (and especially scientific) discourse. Hence neurophobia shares a
similarity with other phobias in that it is not easy to rationalize it
cognitively, an appeal to emotional and pejorative language being the only way
out.

4. The pursuit of ignorance: As with so
many other phobias, this amounts to the wish not to know. Hence, neurophobes
don’t want any scientific ‘de-mystification’, which they would regard as a
“desecration” (note again the emotive language) and prefer to live in
ignorance. This is of course similar to other prejudices, where ignorance is
the preferred course.

5. This arrogance displays itself in their
protecting themselves against the facts. As I have said before, once they
relegate our discipline to the status of “trash”, they need not bother with it.
And there is, in their writings, good evidence that they have not read what we
have written.

6. Arrogance of ignorance: neurophobes
always assume that they know better, and hence lecture us on what they suppose
we are not aware of. They never cease to tell us that art and beauty are not
the same, as if we are not aware of that and have not written about it. They
never cease to emphasize the importance of culture and learning in aesthetic
appreciation, as if this is a new insight that we are not aware of.

7. Attack the methods: where all else
fails, there is always recourse to attacking our methodology – principally the imaging
techniques. They fault these for their spatial and temporal resolution
(sometimes using emotive language) as if we are not aware of these shortcomings
and do not take account of them in our interpretations. (I will have more to
say about this in a future post.) I imagine most are scared of new technologies
that will have greater powers of resolution.

This collection of characteristics is very
descriptive of neurophobia, and they are interlinked. Hence if one detects one
of these characteristics in an individual, one must suspect him/her of being a
neurophobe anddisplay the other
characteristics on gentle probing. Here I would advise caution; it is best to
probe a little further before classifying someone as a neurophobe.

Of course, many of them preface their pejorative remarks with feint praise, such as "Neurology has made important advances" (rather like, some of my best friends are neurologists).

And finally…what one neurophobe says or
writes is remarkably similar to what another one says or writes, reminding me
of the famous line of President Reagan, “There you go again”. Indeed, so
similar are their articles that it becomes reminiscent of another one of
Reagan’s famous lines (about redwood trees): “Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all”.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

In 1995, a Japanese team was awarded
the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for their work describing how pigeons can be
trained to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet. Previous
work had shown that pigeons could distinguish between the music of Bach and
Stravinsky.

Receiving the Ig Nobel Prize must be a
mixed blessing, as its very title implies. Often the implication is that there
is something trivial in the research reported and sometimes it is awarded for
what many would regard as work that is not scientifically worthy, for example a
report to the US Congress that nicotine is not addictive (awarded the Ig Nobel
Prize in Medicine in 1996).

Others are frankly funny, such as the Ig
Nobel Prize for Peace (2000), awarded to the British Royal Navy for a Monty
Python-like command, that its sailors should not use live cannon but instead
shout “Bang”, or the one awarded in Biology (2004) for showing that herrings
communicate by passing wind (farting).

In fact, many of these Ig Nobel prizes
go to worthy and scientifically interesting work. The one about herrings
communicating by farting turned out, apparently, to be strategically and
financially important because the Swedish Navy, suspecting that Swedish waters
were being infiltrated by Soviet submarines, instigated a widespread but futile
hunt for those submarines. After many inconclusive years, it turned out that
the noises were probably coming from farting herrings. Had this been known, it
is claimed, the Swedes would have saved hundreds of millions of Swedish Krones.

Science is, or should be, fun. And even
apparently simple science can be fun BECAUSE it leads to new and interesting
clues. The work for which the Japanese scientists got the Ig Nobel prize in
1995 really showed that pigeons, which have a well-developed visual apparatus,
could distinguish between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet because
they formed a concept of these paintings. They did not apparently distinguish
them because of the presence of sharp edges in the cubist paintings or colour
in those of Monet. Hence, in addition to a well-developed visual apparatus,
they have brains that are sophisticated enough (if that is the right word) to
develop visual concepts about visual stimuli unrelated to their daily lives.

Concept formation, critical for the
acquisition of knowledge, is a fascinating subject, but how the brain forms
concepts is not known in any detail. That pigeons should be able to form
concepts around works designed by humans for consumption by humans, works which
have little to do with their world, perhaps has the germs of an insight into
how more complex brains form concepts. It would, in fact, be just as
interesting to learn how humans form concepts around different schools of
paintings.

If the Ig Nobel prize brings such
interesting science to wider attention, then it is pursuing a worthy cause.